Brilliant! I see this kind of garbage all the time. Thanks for laying it all out so amusingly!

1) There is a trend in the upward direction.

2) Your third graph seems vaguely reminiscent of Elliot Wave market analysis. Look them up.

3) convienceville, KY is an outlier, is not typical of the data, and has been removed from this analysis.

So you’ve been watching the finance guy on the ABC news too.

I don’t know whats so funny, times have been rough here in convenienceville.

How about:
-Eliminate some of the data points, so that the lower dots are gone
-Along with choosing your cutoffs, start your y-axis at a non-zero number. I have seen this done in graphs in magazine ads–very misleading.

Reed: thank you.

Phil: I checked out Elliot Waves and the similarities are as you say pretty amusing. I’m glad you pointed out removing outliers — I might deal with that in a later post.

Graham: I haven’t been watching any finance guys on TV, but I do read the business magazines for a chuckle whenever I’m in a waiting room.

Cody: I’m sorry about the troubles in Convenienceville. If only y’all would vote for [candidate].

Jen: I decided to limit myself to five lies for this post. And who said the y-axis started at zero? :~)

You forgot the most obvious ploy: turn it 90 degrees CW or CCW.

You can also stretch out the x axis and flatten that graph.

I’m a professional investor. I love this presentation. It is amazing the nonsense people continually come up with. The best part of it is: Most of them believe their own nonsense.

The problem is people are programmed to want to recognize patterns. We are very good at making out straight lines. The problem with finance is: there are no straight lines. There are no curved lines. And so our primitive biological senses that are good for telling us the quickest route to some food are terrible at figuring out a subject like finance.

People keep getting it wrong over and over ad nauseum, and they don’t get it. Selective memory: We remember our wins, and forget our losses. So we keep thinking we are doing a good job predicting when we just aren’t qualified to.

I keep track of every profit and every loss in a spreadsheet. It is humbling. But that’s just what I am these days: humble.

Ha! Brings me back to my statistics class I took about four years ago. The textbook showed an example of a graph distorting the info, by using a 3D orange, with the majority side mostly obscured, so that it looked like more people thought organic foods were safer or were unsure, even though about 2/3 disagreed. I also remember graphs where the y axis would start at 40 or 200 or something. Er, yeah.

You see this a lot on Fox News.

I have only watched Fox News on a handful of occasions. It was a handful too much.

It’s cold in Minnesota and temperatures have changed plenty of times before, so CLEARLY there’s no global warming!

Good lesson, man.